Book Review: TATA LOG

TATA LOG tells 8 stories from Tata group of companies. Though it is written by a Tata insider, it is not a book that only praises Tata way of working. Rather it takes a critical view of happenings and that is a strength of this book. Written in a very lucid language, this book is both entertaining and informative. I think all eight stories given in this book can become excellent case studies for discussion in MBA classes and corporate management training programs.   

These eight stories are as follows:

1. Launch of TATA Indica car
2. CSR work by TATA Chemicals 
3. Making of Tanishq brand
4. Trouble at Tata Finance
5. Tata Second Career Program
6. Development of EKA - an Indian supercomputer
7. Acquisition of Tetley by Tata Tea
8. Winning of Deming Prize by Tata Steel

Highly recommended book for business book lovers!

 

Book Review: Never Stop Learning

"Never Stop Learning" is a collection of 14 lessons in which business leaders have shared their learning/opinions/advice about learning. These lessons could be inspiring for the ones who generally question the need for continuous learning. I didn't find anything new to learn from this book though. If you are firm believer in continuous learning then you need not read this book. For others, it will really help!

I have now become TOGAF Eertified Enterprise Architect!

Last week, I appeared and passed the exam for TOFAF Part 1 and Part 2 Combined! So now I can call myself TOGAF Certified Enterprise Architect!

Though I attended the four-day course in last year, I kept on postponing appearing for exam due to work pressure. Finally, I decided to give it a shot and it worked. Though I couldn't score 100%, I could pass with comfortable margin.

The biggest benefit of giving this exam is that it forced me to read TOGAF document from cover to cover. I hope I can utilize this knowledge in some assignments in near future!

What is research?

Today while going through various web resources, I made following notes about what is research:

• Research is different from intelligence gathering, which answers 'what' questions such as what percentage of SMEs in India are owned by women. Research aims to answer 'why' questions such as why Indian manufacturers are less competitive than their Chinese counterparts. 
• Good research is characterized by open system of thought, critical examination of data and specification of the limits on the generalization made.
• Research can be classified as exploratory, testing-out and problem-solving.

How Business Rules Define Your Business Strategy

Today I happened to read MIT CISR research briefing titled as "How Business Rules Define Your Business Strategy". Very precisely, this briefing explains how Business Rule Engine (BRE) can be used to implement aspects of business strategy. It describes a case of Citrix, which used BRE for two business areas: partner certification and partner incentives. Few noteworthy points from this research briefing are as follows:

• A business rule is a specification of the action to be taken in a given business circumstance.
• Business rules connect business strategy and operations by informing daily operational decisions and by informing the metrics on scorecards that track individual performance. 
• Digitization of business rules can facilitate development of single source of truth - a data repository that can be used for reporting and analytics.
• Additionally Management needs to be engaged in continuous coaching of individuals, which can help in clarifying the rules and the data.

Softscaling

I always had a feeling that though western management models have been prominent in our business education, there is something about our Indian management, which is worth study by global managers. So I was happy to see a research briefing from MIT CISR, which is based on research done at five top-performing Indian companies viz., Airtel, Hero MotoCorp, HDFC, Tata Motors and Max Healthcare. The researchers have termed the strategy of these firms as softscaling, which involves combining the rational use of data to optimize business process efficiency with the empathic use of data to understand and connect with customers and other stakeholders. I would strongly recommend reading this 3-page research briefing, which is available online at http://cisr.mit.edu/blog/documents/2012/03/15/2012_0301_softscaling_agarwalweill-pdf/.

Customer-facing digitization creates the most value

In a recently published research briefing from MIT CISR, the authors have recommended that digitization of customer facing processes should be given higher priority than that of shared services and operations processes. Their recommendation is based on the study in which they assessed degree of digitization by examining 12 core enterprise processes in three key areas as follows:

1. Shared Services: budgeting and financial management; closing the book; recruiting and hiring; employee performance; corporate performance
2. Operations: supplier performance; fulfillment; logistics and supply chain
3. Customer facing: identifying sales prospects; managing customer relationships; market testing; identifying customer needs

With a sample of two thousand firm, the key finding is that having more digitized customer-facing processes seems to help performance, particularly growth: firms with digitization of customer-facing processes in the top 25% had a median revenue growth of 9%, compared to 4% median revenue growth for the entire sample.

I agree with this recommendation but for a reason other than mentioned in the research briefing. I think digitization of shared services and operational processes can help improve profitability but to increase revenue, you need to enhance digitization of customer facing processes. My two cents worth!

Book Review: Super Freakonomics

If you have read Freakonomics then you will quickly pick up its sequel – Super Freakonomics. Like its predecessor, this book explains how microeconomics concepts get applied in real life. In this book, the authors have vividly shared findings of their own research and that of others to show how economic principles work in domains such as prostitution, terrorism, healthcare, global warming, etc. Simply superb!

Takeaways for a talk: Happy for no reason

Recently I attended a talk by my colleague, Anandkumar NC. He had given a very interesting title to his talk, Happy for no reason. In a very entertaining way, Anand shared some of the academic research findings and his personal experience for becoming happy for no reason. I had following takeaways from his talk:

• Two myths block our happiness: myth of more and myth of I will be happy when ...
• Three things rob our happiness: victimhood, blaming and feeling shame.
• Plan the work and work the plan. Only plan and no work results into daydreaming! Work with no plan leads to nightmare!

Notes from Book: Software Project Survival Guide

Written by Steve McConnell, an author of Code Complete and Rapid Development, Software Project Survival Guide is an useful resource for both aspiring and experienced software project managers. The templates and checklists discussed in this book along with a survival test are available on this book's web site. Here I am noting down some wisdom nuggets spread throughout this book that I found quite relevant for my current work:

• Early in the project you can have firm cost and schedule targets or a firm feature set, but not both.
• Involving users throughout the project is a critical software project survival skill.
• The working software is a more accurate status report than any paper report could ever be.
• Staged delivery is not a panacea. But, on balance, the additional overhead it demands is a small price to pay for the significantly improved status visibility, quality visibility , flexibility, estimation accuracy, and risk reduction it provides.
• It's better to wait for a productive programmer to become available than it is to wait for the first available programmer to become productive.
• The problem with quick and dirty, as some people have said, is that dirty remains long after quick has been forgotten.
• No individual is a success who hurts the team, and no individual is a failure who helps it.

Book Review: User Stories Applied

This book provides good guidance on user stories. Actually the first section, Getting Started, is the one that provides enough details for learning to write user stories. Second session is about estimation and planning for user stories. Third section provides supplementary information about user stories in chapters such as “what user stories are not”, “why user stories”, etc. Fourth part provides a complete example case study for learning user stories. Final section provides two appendices: one giving an overview of Extreme Programming and other one providing answers to chapter questions. Overall, this book is good read for those who are planning to use user stories as a technique for requirements gathering and analysis during agile software development.

Book Review: Enterprise Architecture Planning

Published almost two decades back, this book provides a prescriptive approach that can be used to create top two layers of John Zachman’s Enterprise Architecture (EA) Framework (as published in year 1987). It provides a ten-phase process, which is phase-wise described in ten chapters. Each of these ten chapters describes the phase by providing steps involved. For each step, the author has mentioned the purpose, deliverables & tasks and guidelines. He has also provided sample documents for business model, data architecture, application architecture and technology architecture, as appendixes. This is a good how-to book for EA and hence every EA professional should consider reading this book.

Book Review: Employees First, Customers Second

Written by CEO of HCL Technologies (HCLT), this book describes a new management philosophy for managing an enterprise in today’s world. The book has got five chapters out of which first four describe four phases of Employees First, Customers Second (EFCS) journey, illustrated with HCLT case. The last chapter answers some of the questions/concerns one would have about the EFCS concept. As its sub-title says, “turning conventional management upside down”, this book provides a contra view of business management, which would make you think if not get convinced. A must-read for every business manager.

Book Review: The TCS Story

Written by former CEO of TCS, this book describes history of TCS in very lucid manner. The author also discusses various initiatives taken by TCS to become top 10 by 2010. He also shares his thoughts about India's future. In certain sense, this book is also an autobiography of the author since he has shared important happenings of his life in this book. What I liked the most is appendix 1 in which his colleagues have shared what they think of the author. I strongly recommend this book to every IT professional.

Book Review: 97 Things Every Software Architect Should Know

This is somewhat unique book since it presents collective wisdom from more than four dozen architects. Each "thing" is presented in exactly two pages. This book is also available online but still reading it in paper book format is really more effective. I would recommend this book to both aspiring and experienced software architects.